Why “heterarchy” might be a better way to describe the shifting roles and relationships that actually hold communities and institutions together.

Carole Crumley is an American anthropologist and archaeologist known for founding the field of historical ecology and for introducing the idea of heterarchy to explain power and complexity in human societies. Heterarchy describes systems where there isn’t one fixed top level of authority—different forms of power can rise, fall, and coexist depending on the situation. It’s a more accurate way to understand complex, changing human systems than strict hierarchy or any single chain of command.

A local response to global crises in agriculture, textiles, and climate

In Nova Scotia, a small but vivid flax-to-linen experiment is quietly rebuilding local textile capacity by braiding together history, culture, small farms, and just-enough machinery. Its aim is not to “compete” with global linen, but to grow a place-based fabric of resilience: cloth that reflects a particular land, climate, and community. Across many regions, similar projects are part of a broader movement toward bioregional fiber systems—asking what it would mean if our wardrobes were as local as our farmers’ markets.

How to reweave the social fabric of the world—one neighborhood at a time

Savannah Kruger and her partner Jon Bo loved their apartment in Boulder, Colorado—close to parks, trails, groceries, and downtown—but felt something was missing. “There wasn’t much community in our neighborhood yet.” So they decided to build it. They began with a simple potluck for their 31-unit building, hand-delivering handwritten invitations and knocking on every door.

Joy as an act of resistance

Willie James Jennings is a professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, a Baptist minister, and the author of The Christian Imagination and After Whiteness. Miroslav Volf is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and a professor at Yale Divinity School. In this interview, they introduce joy as an embodied, communal act of resistance against despair—one that can grow into a sustaining way of life.

Joy and creativity are strategies for liberation.

The future needs our delight as much as our outrage. adrienne maree brown teaches that what we pay attention to grows, and that pleasure can be a strategy for liberation—a way of reclaiming our whole, joyful selves in the face of systems designed to numb, exhaust, and divide us. When joy, kindness, and love are chosen deliberately, the terms of the struggle begin to change. Most of us were taught to think of power as domination, extraction, and control.

We need a new story.

For centuries, many of us in the industrial West have lived inside a tale that casts the world as raw material and humans as its managers, consumers, and winners or losers. This old narrative has powered extraordinary innovation, but it has also delivered us to the brink: a heating planet, frayed democracies, mass extinction, and a pervasive sense that life is speeding up and thinning out at the same time. In that light, the question is not just what policies we adopt or which technologies we deploy, but what story we are living in—and whether it can still hold.

This world that breaks us open also fills us with awe.

To be alive on this planet is to feel the ache of a deep contradiction: the world that wounds us with injustice is the same world that moves us to awe with its beauty. One of the ways that astrologer Rob Brezsny manages this "impossibly wondrous enigma" is to conjure up names for it.

Crisis as catalyst for creative action and innovation

Crises can be deeply troubling and anxiety provoking, and they can also serve as an important catalyst for creative action and innovative outcomes. This is because during times of crisis our typical forms of reasoning and action may no longer serve us.

Laughter creates “open” moments where new ideas can slip in.

Nancy Goldman is an educator, coach, and researcher working at the intersection of storytelling, humor, and social change. Her doctoral research examined how comedians use humor to raise awareness of social and political issues, a foundation that informs her later writing on comedy’s role in democracy.

The day that bell hooks met Thich Nhat Hanh to talk about practicing love in a culture of domination.

bell hooks was a feminist theorist, cultural critic, and writer whose work centered love, justice, and the interlocking realities of race, gender, and class. In her view, love is not merely a feeling but an ethic of will, action, and responsibility. This perspective—especially resonant today—directly challenges cultures organized around domination and fear.

We've lost touch with the fact that the payoffs to our most meaningful endeavors unfold over years and generations, not news cycles.

Media theorist, writer, and documentarian, Douglas Rushkoff, published Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now in 2013. More than a decade later, it reads like a field guide to the world we inhabit today.

Our stories about the future affect our behavior in the present.

Sam Paterson warns that fatalistic “end-of-the-world” thinking closes off possibilities at the very moment we need them most. When catastrophe is treated as unavoidable, action begins to feel symbolic or futile, discouraging collective effort, experimentation, and reform.